Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Armenian merchants and traders arrived in the riverine port city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the 17th century from New Julfa and Shiraz in Persia to trade in silk, textiles, shellac, precious gems and other luxury commodities. Their growing financial affluence, fluency in Persian and freedom from caste prejudices enabled them to act as mediators between the reigning Mughal Emperor Farrukhsiyar and the British East India Company permitting the latter to set up trading posts in Calcutta. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, this maritime trading diaspora played a significant role in shaping the commercial and trading identity of this city that they embraced as their second home, earning a reputation as a loyal, industrious and dependable business community. The proposed paper will attempt to read this history of Armenian cultural hybridity and cosmopolitan adaptability vis-à-vis the chequered life of Joseph Emin (1726-1809) who belonged to a prominent merchant family that fled political turmoil in Iran to settle in Calcutta. Emin’s travel memoir The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin an Armenian, written in English by Himself (1792) traces his journey through places such as Hamadan, Calcutta, London, and Georgia to negotiate and construct a crossover identity that was both Asian and British. His literary self-presentation as an (Asiatic) outsider who gained the respect of his (European) patrons in foreign lands enables both a consideration of transcultural Armenian identity and on the way this mobile and itinerant group was perceived in world history.